Book description
Dubliners, one of the great short-story collections in the English
language, was first published in London on 15 June 1914 by Grant
Richards, who had rejected the original set of twelve stories in
September 1906; in the interim, according to Joyce, it was turned down
by forty publishers.
The author is his own best interlocutor:
'My intention was to
write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin
for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.
I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its
aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories
are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a
style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very
bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform,
whatever he has seen and heard. It is not my fault that the odour of
ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously
believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by
preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in
my nicely polished looking glass.'
This consummate book, illustrated by the artist Louis le Brocquy,
was published privately by The Dolmen Press in 1986. It is now being
made widely available for the first time, the text deriving from
Robert Scholes' 1967 edition, which restored Joyce's original
punctuation and corrections. Le Brocquy's drawings, hieroglyphic
'shadows thrown by the text', are haunting accompaniments to these
fifteen stories or 'incidents' in the life of a city, in Joyce's first
major prose work. With this handsome edition, Dubliners returns
fittingly to its source.
